CERFI – Analysis Everywhere

CERFI – Analysis Everywhere. Militancy, Research, Architecture and Psychiatry
Susana Caló and Godofredo Enes Pereira

Between the radical energies of the 1960s and the shifting terrains of the 1980s, a group in France quietly detonated the boundaries of politics, psychiatry, and collective life. CERFI – the Centre for Institutional Study, Research, and Training – wasn’t your typical think tank. Co-founded by Félix Guattari, it set out to bring the disruptive insights of institutional psychotherapy into the heart of militant and professional organizing. Their wager? That every collective needs a form of analytic militancy: a way to navigate the unconscious forces that shape power, desire, and resistance from within.

This was the birth of schizoanalysis outside of the clinical setting: a practice that shifts focus from the individual psyche
to the collective assemblages that compose our lives. What are the deeper machinic drives shaping our actions? What forms of desire power our institutions? CERFI’s work took these questions seriously, designing communal infrastructures, building popular research teams, and launching Recherches, a journal that amplified voices from revolutionary struggles, childcare centres, classrooms, psychiatric wards, and beyond. Analysis Everywhere dives into the rich archive of CERFI’s radical experiments: conceptual, editorial, and lived. It invites us to imagine a practice where the unconscious isn’t repressed but mobilized. Where analysis isn’t an afterthought but a vital tool for political transformation.

“‘Only Desire Can Read Desire,’ wrote Félix Guattari, and this quote, which Caló and Pereira use as the title of their introduction, expresses the precious specificity of this book. Caló and Pereira’s desire to revive the passionate adventure of CERFI testifies to the fact that this adventure has become contemporary again, something like a resurgence, the reappearance of what had been eradicated and which is returning, transformed but alive.” – Isabelle Stengers

“Very important work has been done by Susana Caló and Godofredo Pereira on the historical and visual reconstruction of a cultural experiment whose practical and theoretical effects have not yet been fully evaluated. – Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi

Bios: Susana Caló is an independent researcher and lecturer at the Open University. Her research focuses on neglected radical histories of psychiatry, exploring their intersections with wider social, political and urban struggles, as well concepts’ social and political lives.

Godofredo Enes Pereira is an architect, theorist and environmental activist. He is a senior researcher at the Royal College of Art. His work investigates architecture’s role in the composition of existential territories.

Ordering Information

Available direct from Minor Compositions for the special price of £15 + shipping.

Please note that, yes, we understand the price of international shipping is high and are arranging for copies to get to distributors as quickly as possible. Copies should arrive in the US in about a month.

A digital version can freely be downloaded here: CERFI – Analysis Everywhere

488 pages, 6 x 9, paperback
UK: £25 / US: $33
IBSN 978-1-57027-398-8

Release to the book trade 1 May 2026

REVIEWS
“The visionary experiment of CERFI once crossed French politics breaking up the borders of psychoanalysis, architecture, and militancy. It revived the lesson of institutional psychotherapy that the hospital is ill, not the patient. Against the apathy of the Left, it envisioned institutions of research, care, and collective planning. This book extends its legacy and political imagination to the present, to a time in which the rise of authoritarianism demands new strategies of organisation and intervention.” – Matteo Pasquinelli, author of The Eye of the Master: A Social History of Artificial Intelligence

“This careful and thorough work revisits the radical experiments of institutional psychotherapy to ask a question that remains urgent today: what makes analysis possible? Drawing on the legacy of CERFI, the book illuminates a unique convergence of clinical innovation and institutional reinvention and reflects on the conditions for analytical militancy. Rather than simply cohering the history of CERFI, the book explores how collective forms of care and thought can sustain multiplicity, resist unification, and open new spaces for subjectivity. Through this lens, the psychiatric institution becomes not a place of containment but a dynamic field, an infrastructure for desire and transformation, captured in the book’s notion of analysis everywhere. At once historical and theoretical, this book offers a critical vocabulary for rethinking psychoanalysis, politics, and organisation today. It challenges us to confront the ongoing anxiety of difference that shapes both clinical and social life. A vital contribution to contemporary psychoanalytic thought, this is a book that insists – against all odds – on the enduring power of collective desire.” – Lizaveta van Munsteren, author of The Vicissitudes of Psychoanalysis in Soviet Russia, 1930-1980.

“CERFI was a vital and radical experiment in research, psychiatry and architecture. Expanding beyond the confines of the university, the clinic or the profession and open to all irrespective of rank, title or qualification, CERFI set into motion a series of concepts and processes that are needed now more than ever. The urban projects, care facilities, clubs, films, and writings – many collected here or translated for the first time, were neither idealised nor utopian but something altogether more powerful – they were concrete interventions in the social field animated by the necessity of keeping fascism at bay. The virulent return of normopathic subjectivities is a sign that fascism is ascendent again, now amplified by powerful technologies of semiotic entrainment. In this context, reactivating CERFI’s commitment to make the libidinal workable in the context of organising, building, and liberating could not be more important and urgent.” – Adrian Lahoud, author of The Rights of Future Generations

“A red thread connects the political thought of Deleuze and Guattari back to the analytic practice developed at institutions like the La Borde clinic: the idea that militant practice must always involve an analysis of desire, of the unconscious libidinal relations that traverse both militants and the reality on which they seek to intervene. If one group tried to live out this principle and explore its implications, it was CERFI. To recover its history and work is therefore not only to shed light on one of the 1960s and 1970s most interesting experiments, but to relaunch this proposition into our own time and practices.” – Rodrigo Nunes, author of Neither Vertical Nor Horizontal: A Theory of Political Organisation

“The transformative history of 20th-century psychiatry is a collective history. However, the ways in which history is often written struggle to give voice to the collective, favouring the work of great men. In this extraordinary book, Susana Caló and Godofredo Pereira explore a collective form for the collective history of CERFI, where a profusion of voices, images and archives also document life.” – Joana Masó, author of Tosquelles: Healing Institutions.